


Metamorphosis

by tofty



Category: Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-04
Updated: 2005-11-04
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:39:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/tofty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blakeney may or may not be conducting an experiment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metamorphosis

Blakeney was well-beloved, both before and after the amputation, there was no doubt about that. But after, things were different, and all the men recognized the difference, though none of them ever spoke of it that Stephen could tell. Blakeney refused to be pitied, got on with life at sea as capably as any seaman stamping the decks on a wooden leg, and the men rewarded him with the friendly respect such stoicism was generally accorded. But there was something else, in the background.

Stephen had formed a theory regarding the crew’s subtly changed, almost tender attitude towards the boy: about the piercing, throat-closing poignancy of a perfect beauty suddenly marred. But he would only have presented this theory to anyone in his most laudanum-dazed dark watches, and then only if someone had thought to ask. And no one had ever thought to ask, thank God.

:::

At first, Maturin thought that he’d been doing the boy a favor, a boy with a curiously quiet heart, a cabin full of quiet curiosities, activities to be completed with relative ease. Stephen thought that his cabin provided, for Blakeney, not so much an addition of thought to the activity of the ship--for above-decks life, he’d discovered, is surprisingly cerebral at times, if not precisely contemplative--as a subtraction of impossible physicality. Blakeney came to him, eventually, comfortable with the sedentary occupation as few others accustomed to life at sea would be, pleased to practice a pursuit that would not accentuate his lacks, and Stephen admitted him and shared his solitude and thought himself the more generous for it.

But as time went on and the two of them bent their heads together over an illustration or an eviscerated specimen, Stephen discovered Blakeney to be more useful than he’d first supposed. Blakeney’s hands were smaller than his own, and, in the evenings when Stephen was clouded and his hands took on a barely-detectable palsy, steadier. Capable of pinning a squirming insect with a single, gorgeous downward thrust, able to tie nearly as well as Stephen, one-handed to Stephen’s two.

Too, the boy possessed a remarkable ability to make connections, to put an experiment into a context that told a story of life, wrote a symphony of it. It was never pure science for young Blakeney! Oh no, he stitched their sessions into life in a way that fascinated Stephen. There were scientists he knew, in their expensively outfitted London laboratories, cutting up exotic creatures for the sheer novelty of it, who had not half the (uncanny, in one so young) feel for the importance of their tasks that Blakeney possessed.

:::

Stephen was almost entirely certain that right up to the night Blakeney kissed him, he’d no notion at all that the boy had been leading up to it, almost entirely certain that he himself had never thought of the boy as anything but a sort of research apprentice. But once it had happened, once he’d realized that Blakeney had, with infinite patience and native cunning, cornered him, he’d wondered, simply because it seemed to fit so seamlessly. Those clumsy, cool lips against his instantly and irrevocably opened up a new life before him, and as his hands braced against the arms of his chair, Blakeney’s hand over one of his, he felt himself step into it as he leaned into the kiss.

In this life, the ship proceeded apace to the tune of his fluttering violoncello, wine-soaked dinners in the Captain’s mess and sand sprinkled on the surgery floor, a luckily-captured dying bird dissected on his table, listing into port gun-damaged and smoke-blackened man and ship alike, the secret exchange of information, same as always. But around those things, Blakeney’s fingers on his belly, the rough scrape of that palm, not inactive enough to have lost the seaman’s callus, on his cock. His own tongue in Blakeney’s mouth. A few minutes stolen in the dark in his cabin, rocking in a cocooning hammock to the motion of the ship, slurred and sleepy and laudanum-smeared. Another few in the faint light of the watch-lamps and a new moon, Blakeney staring at the stars and patiently explaining principles of navigation that Stephen, inexplicably, would never fully understand.

:::

Blakeney, by stitching these sessions into his life, has created a new story, and for once Stephen cannot see a logical conclusion to it. Sometimes he wonders if Blakeney has some sort of object in mind, some theory of his own to prove, but for once, his own powers of scientific prediction and observation are failing him, and so he thinks instead of those hands, that mouth, the towhead bent over sheets of foolscap, the increasingly challenging discussions, choosing the life of the mind made physical over Jack’s open suspicion and the knowing mutters of the crew. He wonders, and wonders at a world where a broken arm and a bone-saw can render such change in one’s life.

Wonders where the wide world will take them, possibly together but probably separately, when the next ship comes along, when the war is over.


End file.
